by Chris Malicki
from
Scope magazine of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada – Toronto Centre
July/Aug. 1984
Elizabeth Malicki, Michael Starzynski and myself, observed the annular eclipse from Cherryville, N.C., 80km west of the official site at Cleveland N.C.
May 29 in Petersburg, Va was cloudy and frequently raining. In fact, as we visited the National Battlefield, a huge cloudburst engulfed us. Everyone was walking around with dismal faces including a busload of Japanese tourists. However, satellite pictures on the TV weather report showed a huge clear area in Georgia slowly moving eastwards.
With this in mind we got up at 4:00 a.m. There was a steady rain in Petersburg on eclipse morning and the local weather station declared that there was almost no chance of seeing the eclipse from there. By 4:45 a.m. we were in the car travelling south-west on I85, It rained well into North Carolina, but by the time we reached Greensboro at 7:30 a.m., some tiny patches of blue were evident. Finally, at Charlotte, the sky was clear and we chose Cherryville (lat 35o, 23 min; long 81o, 23 min 5 sec west); we used the detailed map in the US Naval Observatory circular to find an observing site in a cemetery, less than one km from the centre line.
We had an excellent quiet site with perfect skies and a 360o horizon. We were amazed that visitors to the cemetery seemed to be completely oblivious to the event. In fact, the florists kept putting flowers on one grave right into annularity without once looking up. We were sure that a funeral would take place exactly at annularity (it didn’t). However, at least one bird thought that something strange was happening and went into a roost.
During the entire eclipse we recorded temperatures with two identical thermometers, one exposed to the sun, and the other in the shade. There was a dramatic drop in sun temperature from 22o C. to 9 ½o C. just after annularity (12 ½o drop), and a lesser drop from 14 ¾o C. to 10 ½o C. in the shade (4 ½o drop).
It became noticeably dark a full half hour before annularity and quite dark at annularity. The diamond necklace was a beautiful, dynamic, extremely thin ring with dozens of tiny black breaks all around; it was fascinating to watch its rapid change in shape with constant beads forming and breaking. It was at all times dazzling, but we just had to take brief naked eye glances at the shape of the annulus. We also took unfiltered photos of the annulus with 400 and 600 mm focal length.
We had the great fortune of witnessing shadow bands, evident only on our white sheet (not on the grass or pavement). They were half a foot apart and moved rapidly from west to east parallel to the thin solar crescent. We first saw them at 16h 31m 25s (UT), only 14 seconds before the diamond necklace. (They were not visible at 16h 30m 42s). They were again noted moving in the same direction at 16h 32m 20s (23 sec after the end of annularity). Venus was readily visible 4o west of the sun half a minute before and as long as three minutes after annularity.
In summary, it was spectacular, dramatic, beautiful and too short. We are hopeless eclipse addicts.
P.S. We used universal time signals on shortwave radio for timing of events. Interestingly, the shortwave signals were very strong for the hour around the eclipse but disappeared when more of the sun was uncovered. A further bonus of our trip was a binocular view of the great globular cluster omega Centauri from the latitude of 35o .